SonicWall
Cybersecurity Leader SonicWall Helps its Staff Become More Productive, and Saves its IT Team Headaches, by Moving Phone System, Audio and Video Conferencing to RingCentral Cloud
When we saw how smoothly that transition [to RingCentral] went across the company, and how much everyone liked the solution, we decided to move to RingEX worldwide as our phone solution as well.
Cassandra Hughes
System Administration Analyst, SonicWall
SonicWall, a global provider of cybersecurity solutions, faced two major enterprise communications IT challenges. The first was trying to support the company’s thousands of employees around the world with a legacy infrastructure of communication systems from different vendors.
The second was on-prem phone systems that were unreliable and had become a troubleshooting nightmare.
The company had planned to solve these issues separately, but they found the answer to both with RingCentral.
INDUSTRY
High Tech
HQ
Milpitas, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
1991
EMPLOYEES
1,000+
Maintaining legacy phone infrastructure becomes unbearable
“We’d been discussing for some time how to get rid of our legacy, on-prem phone system,” recalls Cassandra Hughes, system administration analyst for SonicWall. “It created so many problems for us.
“From an IT standpoint, the phones were a major challenge because the system required both constant oversight as well as coding skills just to execute standard tasks, such as adding an extension when onboarding a new employee. Managing the phones took so much hands-on work, and there was no central administrative dashboard. You’d have to log in to a separate platform to update voicemail settings, for example.”
SonicWall’s employees also found the legacy phone system extremely trouble-prone, which created problems for remote workers.
“Also, because our old phone system didn’t integrate with our staff’s key workflow tools—particularly Salesforce—standard tasks often required extra steps. For example, sales reps would locate a prospect’s phone number in our Salesforce platform and then have to copy and paste it, or dial it manually on their desk phones.”
The additional communications challenge the company planned to solve separatel
Complicating matters further, SonicWall’s global staff used different solutions from different vendors for conference calls and for video conferencing.
“This became its own productivity challenge,” says Hughes. “Employees who wanted to switch from a conference call to a video would have to end their call and start up again on a different platform. And all of these tools had different IDs, which made things confusing. It was also common for an employee who scheduled a video conference to find out that not all attendees had accounts set up with that video app.
“We answered this challenge by rolling out RingCentral Meetings. And we thought we would address the phone problem with a different solution. But when we saw how smoothly that transition went across the company, and how much everyone liked the solution, we decided to move to RingEX worldwide as our phone solution as well.”
We’re putting everyone on a single integrated platform now for phone, voicemail, conference calls, video chats, and even online faxing. It’s finally easy to switch in real time from an audio-only conference to a video meeting.
Cassandra Hughes
System Administration Analyst, SonicWall
RingCentral delivers operational benefits companywide
As they roll out RingEX and RingCentral Meetings to their 1,000 plus employees across the global organization, SonicWall is already seeing significant improvements to many of its operations.
“We’re putting everyone on a single integrated platform now for phone, voicemail, conference calls, video meetings, and even online faxing,” explains Hughes. “It’s finally easy to switch in real time from an audio-only conference to a video meeting.”
“Our sales teams are also finding it easier than ever to make sales calls. Using the RingCentral Salesforce integration, reps can now click a lead’s number in their Salesforce account and automatically dial that number using RingCentral. This saves a great deal of time—I’d estimate at least couple of person-hours a day across the company—and it’s helping our sales teams cover more ground.
“As for our IT teams, RingCentral is helping us save time and more quickly isolate issues when they come up. If an employee calls IT with a call-quality issue on their current call, that administrator can jump into the system in real time to see what’s happening with that call. The administrator can also access that employee’s recent call history, which can help further narrow possible reasons for the problem call.”
The company is also gaining key business intelligence using RingCentral’s data reporting and analytics functionality.
“With our legacy system, sales managers would have to ask IT administrators to put call-data reports together and deliver them, which consumed IT time and meant that sales teams had to wait longer for important call-history data. With RingCentral, pulling the calls report is so simple that it’s now self-serve for any manager who wants them.
“One sales manager went into the RingCentral call-reporting system and set up an automated daily email to herself and her entire sales team, containing everyone’s call history from the previous day. They can review stats for each rep such as talk time, and the number of inbound and outbound calls handled in a given day. Having access to this data is great for sales training and for incentive programs the sales managers like to use, such as end-of-quarter contests.”
Also, thanks to RingCentral’s call-anywhere softphone capability and desktop and mobile apps, many SonicWall employees are finding they no longer need to be at their desks to be productive and accessible.
“We started a pile for discarded desk phones for employees who don’t want them anymore,” explains Hughes. “People are dropping them off all the time.”